Will “Christian” mean “African” someday?

In the future, if you’re a Christian, you most likely will be an African!

By 2060, 40% of all Christians will live in Africa, according to a recent Pew Research study.[1] Currently, about 26% of Christians live there. Why the change?

Several factors are at play: Africa has higher birth rates than the West, the West is quickly secularizing, and – let’s not forget – Christ is building His church in Africa!

This presents us with an amazing opportunity to impact the future of the global church. It also begs the question of how healthy the African church will be if the prosperity gospel and other unbiblical doctrines drive much of this growth.

That’s why LRI focuses on empowering African leaders to lead movements of God’s Word in their countries.

Consider these testimonies from three African brothers who have gone through our training:

Francis, a church planter in Togo:

“The training helps to avoid heresies and to help them focus on the Word, and to avoid this framework . . . Most of the time in Africa, because of the background we have in animism, we try to enforce our points of view on the text. We, instead of letting the text speak to us, we want to speak on behalf of the text. . . . We need to work on that and avoid that.”

Bonigava Johnson from Uganda:

“I’ve seen tremendous improvement in my preparation of the sermons and also in the trainings I do with the youth and the students in [the] Kisoro Baptist Association. . . . [LRI’s] tools . . . equip and empower the head and also go deep into your heart so that you do not [just] have the knowledge about God, but you experience Him in your day-to-day life, so that by the time you finish preparing the sermon, you are already a transformed being. Bringing the training deep into the countryside of Uganda. . . . opened the opportunity for those who are not able to find these trainings in other places that Leadership Resources trained. . . . I want to pray that this training will continue to go far and wide so that the church is equipped.”

Peter Motunga from Kenya:

“What I was preaching, I could not understand very clearly. In fact, I was just babbling, babbling in the ministry. And when I entered the TNT, I started knowing who God is. I started knowing the mind of God. I started knowing on how to preach this gospel. That’s why I said that I was blind but now I can see. . . . I can say that now I am pregnant, and I am about to deliver. And what I’m going to deliver, it is only what I have learned from the TNT.”

Join us in prayer that God would continue to raise up more passionate and gifted men to lead movements of His Word in Africa!

In His service,

Craig Parro

PS: We want the future of African Christianity to be rooted in God’s Word, but we can’t do our work without the support of faithful partners like you. Consider a gift today to help strengthen the African church.

[1] See “Sub-Saharan Africa will be home to growing shares of the world’s Christians and Muslims” on pewresearch.org.

Resharing with kind generosity from Leadership Resources.